Interview: Nicolas Aubert, Professor at Toulon University and INSEEC

Mr. Nicolas Aubert’s paper “Employee Ownership: A theoretical and empirical investigation of Management Entrenchment vs. Reward Management”, written in collaboration with Guillaume Garnotel, André Lapided and Patrick Rousseau, will soon be published in the Economic Modelling Journal.

As a user of IODS databases since 2012, which databases have you used so far ?

We have used the Corporate Governance database and the Eurofidai database from the IODS platform.

On the whole, are you satisfied with IODS databases?

IODS offers remote access at a very reasonable price. These two aspects of the IODS offering make it very attractive. In addition, the modular function (the possibility to add options) is also very interesting.

Interview of Erwan Salque, Associate Professor at the University of Lorraine (IAE of Nancy)

An example of IODS databases usage for teaching purposes

Could you present to us the course you teach at the IAE of Nancy?

This year, we have started to use the Altares database for teaching purposes in our first year financial analysis masters classes at the ISAM IAE in Nancy, and in particular in a professional practices course.

My aim is to make students experiment with financial databases they will utilise in their future career.

Indeed, during my stay at KPMG, I had to use similar databases whether it was to analyse companies or to conduct macroeconomic studies.Knowing how to use these databases is therefore a real added value to a student’s CV.

The point of view of Bernard Dumas

Bernard Dumas, Chaired Professor of Finance at INSEAD, is the founder of IODS. For several years now, he has been pushing for the European equivalent of extensive database access that already exists for American researchers via Wharton. It was Dumas that convinced the INSEAD Foundation to support IODS by finding sponsors and the necessary funding.

Bernard Dumas, for a long time you have expressed the need for a web service that would aggregate European data and make them available to all. Where does this idea come from?

For several decades, while teaching courses in Investments, I have had the opportunity to observe that European asset-management professionals regretted that academics, including European academics, did very little empirical work concerning the European financial industry. It is true that most of the published empirical work has been conducted on U.S. data, except in those rare cases in which a special type of data did not exist in the U.S. and could be found in Europe. Familiarity with U.S. databases lead to more familiarity with U.S. databases as researchers tend to start up a new investigation on data that everyone is familiar with. We had to try and break that cycle by making European data more readily available. Twenty years ago, INSEAD itself had considered the possibility of starting a service like IODS but the cost had been found to be prohibitive for a single institution.